Pierre Schaeffer

Each fall, I teach a freshman seminar at The College of New Jersey titled, "Music and the Natural World." TCNJ's freshman seminars are each a semester long, and designed to expose students to interesting research and scholarly pursuits across disciplines. Topics range widely and include lots of topics that might spark the interest of recent high school grads, while giving them an entry to scholarship.

The course is a gas and I'm looking forward this fall. We read essays and articles in philosophy, musicology, physics and biology, ancient history … And we listen to a wide range of music, most of it outside the Western classical canon.

One figure we talk about each semester is Pierre Schaeffer and his work in musique concrète. So I was delighted to find this online article posted on the Vinyl Factory site that has an annotated listening guide, with complete works, as well as a good overview of his early career. The line between Schaeffer's work and sampling and hip-hop seems plain and straight to me, but my students have a harder time seeing it. Having this explanation in hand may help.

Plus there's a lot of stuff here I hadn't heard before. Spending part of my afternoon listening to the creepy and beautiful 1953 opera Orphée 53.

A separate work by Schaeffer colleague Pierre Henry, written the same year and on the same subject, Le Voile de Orphée II, features the first recorded use of the phonogene, shown above. A precursor of the simpler Mellotron, it featured multiple tape heads and a one-octave keyboard controller that could create a wide range of effects using prerecorded tape. The phonogene is mentioned in the Vinyl Factory article as one of the technological innovations created by Schaeffer and Henry in their time at the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète.

--C.

June 7, 2018

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'Music and the Natural World'

Tomorrow my Fall semester class at The College of New Jersey begins. I'm teaching a Freshman Seminar titled "Music and the Natural World."

The idea for this course came out of a discussion on the Society of Music Theory email list about five years ago. Some on the list were interested in whether a music theory course could somehow work in ideas related to sustainability -- a hot topic at the time, as the academic world was reacting to mounting pressures to address climate change and environmental issues. The thought was that sustainability was one of the most important issues of our age and we had a responsibility as educators to reflect that concern to our students.

I was among those theory teachers who said, No, it can't be done. The theory curriculum is already demanding for the students and time allowed for that curriculum is far too brief. Moreover, the link between theory and sustainability is flimsy at best. We can recycle paper. But that's about it. In one way or another, most of theorists agreed with that assessment.

Out of that discussion, however, the idea arose that a separate course could be designed that focus on repertoire and environment. Composers throughout history have been inspired in many ways by the beauty of the natural landscape and composers today are examining that relationship in everything from traditional "musical landscape" scores to computer models of natural systems and chaos theory.

My thought was that, in a framework like that, students would be naturally sensitized to issues of sustainability and human responsibility for our changing environment. Putting it in a freshman seminar seemed perfect, as it allowed for a more broad-ranging discussion.

TCNJ's freshman seminars are intended give students an introduction to scholarship by presenting them with a subject of study, much like a graduate seminar, and then guide them through the process of research and scholarly discussion. The first two years in college are generally spent on required courses, with little other opportunity for this kind of personal scholarship.

By now, I've taught this particular course three semesters and I grow from the experience each time. We gambol around music history and the musicological spectrum, touching on other disciplines like philosophy, physics, sociology and biology. Since the course is open to students of any major, there are a jungle of approaches popping up in each classroom. Each voice adds to bigger picture.

We will start with an nature-themed trip through the classical repertoire, introducing some writings of Goethe and others along the way, and then head off into ethnomusicology and topics in semiotics before getting into soundscapes, musique concrete and John Cage. And we wind up with a look into the not-so-distant future of virtual environments -- what of nature, or of ourselves, do we take with us into the wholly digital city?

It's a mash-up dance, a rough-and-tumble idea playground.

So here we go. I'm excited. It's going to be a great semester.

--C.
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Springsteen Class

I was MIA in this blog for most of October as a result of a convergence of personal and professional demands. Most lovely among these was substituting as instructor for two weeks in a freshman seminar at The College of New Jersey. I already am teaching one freshman seminar class (on the topic of "Music and the Natural World"). Here though, I was asked to fill in for two sections of the course, "The Lyrics of Bruce Springsteen as Literature." I live in Asbury Park and have followed Springsteen's progress since "Born to Run" hit the charts while I was in high school, so this assignment was a natural fit.

Freshman seminars are designed to introduce students to the work involved in real scholarship at more advanced levels. Ideally, they would pick something that interests them and be guided through detailed study, modeling the experience of upper-level undergraduate or graduate school courses. The reality falls somewhat short of that: The students are forced to choose from a list of predetermined courses and asked to balance their course selections across from categories designed to cover the whole of the liberal arts. Then they have to shoehorn those choices into a daily schedule. As a result, every class will have some kids left wondering why they are there. But still, the goal of the program is to engage the freshman in individualized research--very different from my first years in college.

Considering Springsteen's lyrics as literature isn't a stretch. We've seen presidents, politicians, authors and commentators quoting from his songs. Albums recorded in the 1970s and '80s still have currency, finding new audiences and influencing young musicians. Subjecting those lyrics to a semester-long course of study might seem over the top--until you actually start the research. Then it becomes clear there's a lot to say. So much has been written about Springsteen's music--thousands of books and articles--but much more could be.

In the classes I taught, for instance, we spent a good bit of time on the political ramifications of the song "Born in the U.S.A." (1984) and how the deliberately patriotic album cover and the upbeat, anthem-like music seemed to contradict the lyrics' portrait of a beat-down vet. That contrast alone is worth a ream of paper at least (especially since Springsteen recorded an earlier, much more subdued version of the song). We noted the way the words succinctly capture complex social issues surrounding the Vietnam war, ("I had a brother at Khe Sahn, fighting off the Viet Cong/They're still there; he's all gone"). The narrator is not Springsteen himself, but one of the many working class joes that populate his songs. That character is celebrating his rough birthright with all the joyous fervor of a good barroom brawl. He challenges us to accept that this is his America, too.

Is it OK to celebrate failure? Is it patriotism to write about things as they are? Great questions for freshmen to try to answer.

Every album since the 1975 "Born to Run" is full of similar, if less obvious, conflicts--challenges to societal norms, provocative blends of good and evil within a single character, jabs at political issues, difficult personal relationships worked out through characters and rhymes. You don't have to be a die-hard fan to mine the rewards of these stories.

But for me the best part of teaching these classes was not Bruce. It was, as always, simply being able to talk to the freshmen, to participate in the flow of ideas and insights that are shaping who they will become. Open faced and newly vulnerable to the robo-assembly line challenges slamming them every second, they give me a reason to believe in a future less horrorshow; a hope that somehow together, taking a careful look at meanings--almost regardless of where we find them--we can help put humanity to rights.

--C.
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TCNJ Percussion Ensemble Tongiht

Tonight I'm going to The College of New Jersey Percussion Ensemble recital, 8 p.m. in the Music Building theater. Free admission. This student ensemble is led by Bill Trigg, who appears with area orchestras and ensembles including the Car Music Project. In addition to being the director of the percussion ensemble, Bill is the main percussion instructor at the college and the coordinator of the schools percussion resources.

A bunch of new music will be on the program. Bill himself has written something for this concert along with me and others (whose names I don't know yet). According to his Facebook announcement "6 works written within the past 20 years, 6 living composers, 4 in attendance! Gonna be awesome!!" Bill will be on WTSR, 91.3 FM, from noon to 1 p.m. today talking about the program.

The piece of mine is a very short quartet for mallet instruments that I wrote as a part of a handful of composition studies using the computer. The title is 'L'Homme Arme' Canon and as that suggests, it was inspired in part by the centuries old pop song, "L'Homme Arme" ("The Armed Man"). The old song has been famous seemingly forever, although these days it is most famous for being famous. During the Renaissance, it was one of those songs that everyone knew, apparently, even non-French speakers. As a consequence composers liked to play with it, quoting it in various works. In particular, the song appears as a basis for dozens of masses during the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries.

Why I was playing with it I'm not quite sure. I liked the way the structure of the melody defined the structure of mass movements by those composers, so I was adapting it into a modern idiom and finding that it still worked quite well. I also liked the testosterone-laced implication of the lyric--the armed man is coming, protect yourselves! It's a message that wouldn't look out of place in a rap song.

One of the pieces that came out of those studies was "Les Femmes Armees" ("The Armed Women"), a solo flute toccata that Elizabeth McNutt and Patti Monson have both performed. The tune doesn't appear in there anywhere, but it is affecting the background structure and, more importantly, the music developed directly out of my playing with the "L'Homme Arme" tune.

The "Canon" on tonight's program is a tricky little number and the tune is spelled out a couple times, most notably by a piano playing in octaves at the end. (One of the two vibes players gets to play the handful of piano notes.) This piece started off, like most of my music, as an atonal piece. But as I was writing it I get stripping out accidentals and smoothing out the voice-leading. Little by little. Finally, I threw up my hands and said, OK, it wants to be in F Major, let it be in F Major! From there I finished it in a couple hours.

The piece then sat on the shelf for 14 years--partly because it was so short, partly because it was a bit of an anomaly in my style and partly because the low marimba part goes all the way down to low F, which most instruments can't do. So I let it sit there until Bill happened to mention the low-range extension on his instrument and invited me to have the Percussion ensemble perform something of mine. I attended a rehearsal Wednesday and they are is doing a great job with it. But man is it short! Don't hiccup or you'll miss it.

--C.
http://www.theandofone.blogspot.com

"Music and Human Experience"

Teaching a Fall semester Freshman Seminar at The College of New Jersey on the topic of "Music & Environment." I've noticed, of course, that there's relatively very little scholarly writing on this topic, despite the fact that every writer on music at some time or another points out the love of Nature (with a capital N) exhibited by musicians of all cultures through the ages and to a lesser extent the relationship of a composers' environments to the work they create.

The only actual textbook I've found specifically on this subject is called Music and Human Experience, by Arthur Komar, and was published in 1980. The book attempts a standard survey-of-music curriculum from the perspective of music's functions within society. It's a fascinating approach and handy to have. But it is also hopelessly out of date from a teaching perspective, pointing out just how much our culture has changed in the last few decades.

Given the book's raison d'etre as a substitute for standard intro to music literature texts, its emphasis on Western musical canon and standard repertoire is somewhat understandable. Within that scope, Komar strikes a nice balance of informative and entertaining, perfect for the lay reader. But it's been a long time now since educators have allowed themselves to talk exclusively about the music of Europe in such a course. In that respect, the book simply represents the dead end of an era.

Funniest of all in light of contemporary standards is the unit "The Music of Lands and Peoples" which deals exclusively with nationalist-inspired composers, from Mussorgsky to Copland. Just passing remarks on Bartok and little discussion of the growing ethnomusicology research, let alone its ethical quandaries. No mention of world music influences. No mention at all of African American music or its influences on European repertoire apart from Milhaud's use of jazz and one or two other such. No mention at all of women composers. No mention of environmentalism or soundscapes. No acknowledgement of the power of popular music (barely even a reference to the Beatles).

Even by the standards of the day, the absence of any discussion on minimalism is glaring. The style was still evolving and at the time amounted to an open sore on the body of traditional classical music scholarship. Funny, that so often what we can't see or can't tolerate in the present becomes the central element in our recounting of history.

I would say the '80s were the cutoff point for this particular group of offenses. By the mid-'90s, every music department was at least encouraging scholarship in these overlooked areas--perhaps "overlooked" is too soft. "Ignored" would might be the more correct word. A 1983 article on the absence of women composers in contemporary textbooks uses the diplomatic phrase "benign neglect."

No matter how you look at it, it's hard to believe that such a complete shift in scholarly expectation and emphasis, one that is now so widely accepted, could have occurred so recently.

I've got Komar's book on reserve for my students (that is, they can read it but do not have to buy it). Along with the valid scholarship it presents and its attempt to tie together music with other aspects of life, it offers a time-capsule glimpse of the wildly shifting sands of cultural definition and the simple, yet glaring mistakes that await us in our research.

--C.